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As a responsible webmaster of a personal (non-commercial) website, I try to ensure that my pages are reasonably accessible to my visitors.
However: no site can be all things to all people.
I characterize the majority of my visitors as being interested in their German heritage. They may be relatives or persons of German descent. This means
Visitors may also include other researchers and other non-professional webmasters, both with variable levels of computer skills, and who may be more interested in research and website methodology.
Search engine spiders need to be considered and accomodated in order to facilitate access by real people.
| Type | Examples | How to address |
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| Sensory |
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| Technological |
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| Cognitive |
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These pages validate to the HTML 4.1 web standard, use well-supported CSS attributes, use Javascript sparingly, and (hopefully) degrade gracefully when less-capable browsers or assistive technologies are used.
Navigation is simple but pervasive, linking related pages, but not necessarily accessing the whole disparate website. Top-of-page links are to higher levels of the website - home page and section index pages. Internal hyperlinks within content sections allow additional movement between pages. Outside links are periodically checked and broken links fixed or removed.
Accesskey & tabindex have not been applied as
most visitors would not need or know how to use these options. I should
re-evaluate using these elements.
The whole website uses a stylesheet for a consistent appearance. There is only 1 frames page; it has a specific purpose.
Adobe Acrobat Reader (to access .PDF files) is the only plug-in required. Links to the Adobe download page are on the same page as the links to the PDF files.
Geocodes may be embedded
in page meta tags.
This website is not optimized for handheld devices (PDAs, etc.): XHTML
is not used.
Multiple languages are used at this site, especially German and English. Language is determined primarily by either the source used or by the topic.
Text language is identified through inline lang tags and page
meta tags. The ISO-8859-2
(Eastern European) character set is specified. (An upgrade to Unicode may be
feasible soon, as browser support is much better now).
Side-by-side translations of navigation, page headings and sometimes content text is provided. Bilingual headings are intended is to provide enough information in the secondary language to describe the content to the visitor even if the full text is not translated.
The texts are written for an audience literate in the language of the text and are grammatically correct where not transcribed as written. Abbreviations and acronyms are commented.
On-line translation resources are described on Translation Gateway Page.
My colour palettes should be acceptable to most and where colour is not simply aesthetic, greyscale differences should suffice. Colours and fonts were chosen with optimum readability and availability in mind. The background image has a subtle pattern and the pale straw colour should provide a good contrast against mostly black text.
Most visual conventions for hyperlinks have been retained (underlined text, blue for unvisited, red for selected). However, the visited link colour is green, not purple (fits better with my colour scheme and stands out better from the black regular text, to help repeat visits). Also, during hover and select, the link is also highlighted to help visibility.
Animated images are not used.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used; these allow overriding of style and
changes to text size by the visitor's browser and interpretation by screen
readers. Alternative text (alt tags) are provided for images.
Captions may enhance some images.
Currently there are no audio (sound) or video files on this site: captioning and transcripts are not applicable.
Topics are appropriate for purpose of this website. Copyright is respected and work of others is attributed. The website is still growing.
Although the content is family-oriented, some historical transcripts may contain controversial or politically incorrect statements by today's standards. Some descriptions of events may be disturbing to younger readers.
Living persons are protected by not having full identifying information available. Although full names and birthdates may be reproduced in some databases, the current residence and exact identity is not easily determined.
Because this is a personal website, legislation mandating accessibility (currently) does not apply. Legislation does apply to many sites offering essential services.
See Accessability -Telecommunications and IT access for more details on WAI, WCAG (voluntary initiatives) & Section 508 (U.S. legislation) and Accessible Information and Communications Standard for proposed legislation for Ontario/Canada.
How legislation is applied when visitors, webmasters and website hosting may all be in different countries, is probably still a developing area.
Although I have checked this website for compliance to W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (some deficiencies found), I should repeat the test, summarize the results and detail planned corrections.
